The assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has occasioned a lot of valuable, eye-opening discussions in the media, but few if any have focused upon how Abe’s death could be seen as a form of karmic payback–what happens when you ignore the lessons of history in the pursuit of raw political power.
Former Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, who died February 1, was an evil man. Any honest obituary would admit as such.
The Covid pandemic has gradually unleashed political and social forces in Japan that have lifted its underlying xenophobia to the surface, and thus transformed its culture from one of attraction into one of repulsion for many of its previous admirers.
In what may prove to be an escalating problem in Japan, young Chinese looking for employment in small startups and technology-related firms appear to be facing a wall of suspicion and sometimes outright racism.
Japan’s decision to exclude most foreigners, including many foreign residents, from entering or reentering the national borders during the Covid pandemic has had a human and reputational cost which the mainstream media has tended to either ignore or to downplay.
Despite the drastic decrease of new Covid cases in recent weeks and more than two-thirds of the population having become fully vaccinated, the Japanese government has still given no explanation why it is continuing to refuse to let international students and some foreign workers back into the country.
SEALDs, short for Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy, was a student activist organization in Japan that provided an important spark to the large-scale protests against then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s 2015 “Legislation for Peace and Security” (i.e. the Abe War Law), deemed by the vast majority of Japan’s legal scholars in the field to be unconstitutional.
This SNA Speakeasy features Hiroki Takeuchi on the theme of “Japan at the Center of Trade Rulemaking in Asia-Pacific.”
The notion that racism and sexism were the primary factors driving the Donald Trump vote is not born out by the data, economics was very important too.
More than eighty historians of fascism and authoritarianism from around the world have signed an open letter warning that US democracy is in existential peril and urging people to take action now before it’s too late to save it.
